Janet Baker is one singer who brooks no argument, has no doubters and features
on everyone’s greatest singers list

Whenever connoisseurs of the voice make their lists of “the 10 greatest singers of the 20th century”, there are always certain artists they can’t agree on. For some, Renata Tebaldi was too histrionic; for others, Jussi Björling lacked evenness of tone.

Even with the legendary Maria Callas, there are dissenters, with some saying she was a great artist who lacked the technical equipment to make the best use of her gifts.

However, there’s one singer who brooks no argument, has no doubters and features on everyone’s list. She is Dame Janet Baker, who will be 80 tomorrow. This unanimity of opinion could actually be held against her; it could point to a slightly stodgy, dependable English professionalism, lacking that spark of utter individuality that provokes passionate advocacy for or against.

But that would certainly be wide of the mark. The essence of Janet Baker’s appeal is the utterly personal quality of her voice, which thrills one to the marrow. Once heard, it’s never forgotten. Like Aretha Franklin or Billie Holiday or Hans Hotter, Dame Janet’s voice completely embodies its possessor, in a way that transcends genre and style.

One thing that Dame Janet certainly lacked, in comparison with many of the singers on those lists, is a colourful biography. Not for her the well-publicised spats with opera managements, the tempestuous love life and the extravagant spending that often accompanies a proper diva’s life. Her biography could be told in one sentence: she discovered her gift, worked hard to perfect it, sang a few carefully chosen roles and gave wonderful song recitals, travelled relatively little, and retired at the top of her game in 1989, aged only 56.

At a glance, the life seems almost too sensible, in a vocation that actually seems to require a certain recklessness. With many of the great singers, art really does imitate life, in the sense that the extravagantly romantic roles they portray have been prefigured in their own lives.

In fact, Janet Baker in her early days was thought to have a certain English stiffness about her. In the mid-Fifties, when she moved from Yorkshire to London for singing lessons (taking a job in a bank to keep a roof over her head), Meriel St Clair, her teacher, wasn’t entirely flattering about her.

“Meriel used to say however hard I was trying, I always looked like a lump of pudding,” Dame Janet is quoted in John Steane’s biography as saying.

At the age of 23 she entered the Kathleen Ferrier competition, and only managed to carry off the second prize. The dissenting judge, Lord Harewood, remarked that her voice was “very well contained, very beautiful … the timbre is in embryo, cool and collected”. Collected, Baker always remained. Cool, she never was.

What happened to transform her from the slightly plain girl with a lovely voice into the great artist, able to impersonate Berlioz’s tragic Dido or Orfeo in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and pierce to the heart of the German and French songs she sang so wonderfully?

Dame Janet herself provides the clue. “The real step is taken by something psychological inside yourself,” she once remarked. Note the passive voice of that sentence. It’s as though her role was to wait patiently for the change to happen, while honing her technique so that she would be ready when the time was ripe.

It’s an attitude that is almost unique among performing artists, and much more characteristic of creative artists. One is reminded of the poet Rilke at a creatively lean period of his life, honing his poetic technique so that he would be ready when inspiration struck.

Dame Janet’s extraordinary self-awareness as an artist began young — at the age of four, when, as she put it, “I became aware that I could read”. The fact that her earliest memory is to do with words is significant. She has been passionate about literature all her life. “I would even go as far as to say that I could live without music but not without books,” she said in an interview with Gramophone magazine.

The second formative memory came three years later, when she was listening to the radio.

“As the sound of the music filled the room, I felt my whole being respond to it: for the first time I knew myself separate from my parents and my brother, who were listening with me, and I experienced being alive.”

Music and words: these were the twin roots of Dame Janet’s being, and it took her a long time to understand how she could reconcile them in song.

Song has its purely musical aspect, expressed through the cultivation of a beautiful line. Here, another early experience proved crucial. “The treatment in the high Church of England services of the psalms, I now realise, is a heritage I’m most grateful for,” she said in that interview. “I think it is, in many ways, the purest style of singing — it teaches you legato [smooth sound] above everything.”

Then there’s the other side of song, to do with meaning. Baker always insisted that infusing the smooth melodic line with the sound and meaning of the words is the real test of an artist. For that to happen, the unconscious mind had to take a hand.

It’s rarely mentioned that one of her favourite authors is Carl Jung, the founder of depth psychology. One sees his influence in her lecture The Singer and the Art of Communication, given at the Royal Society of Arts in 1996. In it she speculated that the greatest performers, in sport or art, “hand over the responsibility to another, more powerful aspect of the personality, which can imbue the body with stamina or interpretative depths beyond the norm”. “Depths beyond the norm” is exactly what Dame Janet gave us, time and again.

Part of her genius lay in knowing the limits of her gifts. She never attempted the heavy Wagnerian or Strauss roles that were beyond her. And she retired when her talent was still at its peak. (This is another reason the world’s praise for her is so unspotted by dissent. There are no bad recordings to sully her achievement.)

Everyone will have their favourite memories or moments. The recordings she made with Sir John Barbirolli, particularly of Elgar’s Sea Pictures, will be high on most people’s lists. I never tire of listening to her recording of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été with Barbirolli and the New Philharmonia Orchestra. That drooping downward gesture on the word “plainte”, referring to the sad song of the white dove, is so exactly right. It doesn’t express the word, it embodies it.

All this is the public side of Dame Janet Baker. Faced with its imperious demands, she had to neglect her private side for many years. Since her retirement, she’s been making up for that, caring for her husband and nurturing younger talent. She still teaches, and is revered by gifted students such as Christianne Stotijn. She doesn’t feel sad about turning her back on singing, because as she told Michael White for The Daily Telegraph in 2011, “the driving force that directed my life is still there. Since 1989, I’ve found other things to do. I’m learning how to be a human being.”

Most of us will feel that’s an art she mastered long ago, in the process giving us some of our deepest musical experiences. Happy birthday, Dame Janet.